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I am pleased to let everyone know that I am going to be doing a short talk at That Conference on August 9th. I am the last session, 2:30 pm, on the last day of the conference, which runs from August 7-9. The title of my talk is “Password Security, you might be doing it wrong” and you can read the full description of the talk on the session page.

I am very honored and a little humbled to be included among the many great speakers that will be at That Conference. One of the nice perks is that I will also get to attend many great sessions at the event before I have to speak.

I am doing a test run of my session with my co-workers next month, after that I will plan on posting a little more information about the talk.

A few months ago a buddy of mine at work asked if wanted to “see something interesting” and told me to go to Glass House Brewing in my browser. If you go there now, you will see a different site, but at the time, this is what the site looked like:

I would love to know the back story behind this little feud that wound up playing out in public. Maybe they would tell me the whole story over a beer? I will say at least the designer made sure that it looked okay on a mobile screen as well:

Right before I hit “publish”, I remembered a similar post that I did from 2008: Messy Divorce: Internet Style. I guess I should do a post like this every decade or so to remind people to secure their domain names.

I am almost always on time (*). I am this way because I plan to be on time. If I am going somewhere I have never been, I make sure I know the route to get there and know a couple of alternate routes, just in case. If the weather is going to be bad, I plan for extra time in getting there. I will sometimes check the traffic conditions ahead of time in case I need to adjust for that, in this day and age it is really easy to do. I always schedule times between meetings, especially if I have to travel from location to location and actually block the travel time on my calendar.

It really irks me when I show up to a public event and you hear somebody announce: “Well we are going to just wait a few minutes before we start to see if anyone else is going to show up”. You are doing two things with a statement like this:

Teaching people that it is okay to be late

Punishing the people that were on time

As someone who used to put on public events, I know what the thinking is. You had 30 people sign up, but you are looking at a room with about 15 people in it. Somewhere in your mind you are convinced that there are 15 people who are at a stop light just a block away and if you give them 5 minutes they will all be in their assigned seats. Reality: There is almost always a 50% drop off in the number of people who sign up for an event (unless you are charging for tickets) and while you might get one or two people showing up late, you are just wasting the time of the people that showed up on time.

One of my favorite stories was about the Baseball General Manager, Branch Rickey, and how he used to handle players that showed up late. If you were 2 minutes late to a team meeting, he would fine the player for two hours pay. His thinking was that the player had just cost the organization two hours’ worth of time (there were 60 people who attended these meetings between players, coaches and staff).

How do you fix this?

My first thought is to say just start on time, but if people actually did this, I would not be writing this post. But here are a couple of techniques that I have seen success with.

Publish a soft start time and a hard start time. They recently did this at the place that I work out. 8:30 was the Doors Open / Networking time and the Presentation started at 8:40 – sharp. This was a live webcast, where the lights went down and the doors closed (and effectively locked). The people who did not want to network could roll in at 8:39 (but not later) and the few legitimate late people did not miss the start of the presentation.

Plan for a “warm” start. Rather than diving into the meat of the material, plan 5-10 minutes up front that a person could miss but still get value out of the event. Don’t make it just filler material or something that it is waste of time. Think of it as a “bonus” for the folks that showed up on time.

(*) As a quick aside, I don’t necessarily like to be early either. In some ways it can be just as rude to be super early as it is to be late. Again, my goal is to be “on time”.

Several years ago, I help create and co-host a podcast called The Thirsty Developer with my good friend and fellow Microsoft Evangelist, Dave Bost. Creating, producing and editing the show was one of the most enjoyable experiences I have had around work. I hesitate to call it work, because we did it mainly after hours and had so much fun doing it.

I left the show when I changed roles at Microsoft and a couple of other folks had co-hosting duties after me: Clark Sell and Adam Hoffman. Of course you never really “leave” something that you helped create, you only stop doing it as often.

As some of you may know, Dave passed away a couple of years ago. I don’t speak much of it on social media, but I miss him terribly even to this day. I worked with Dave’s wife to transfer the domain name over to me. In doing so we had some issues with the content. The site was “off the net” for a few months.

I did manage to find a copy of the site that dated back to when I was still running things. I have the RSS feed for the majority of the show notes (I think I have ~90 of the 104 total episodes). However, I only have 69 of the audio files.

I am hoping that I can find more of the audio files and locate the rest of the show notes as well. If anyone stumbles across any of the old shows, please let me know.

I hope that keeping the old episodes out there will allow the many great guests developers and other friends of the show a chance to go back and listen to their favorite episodes.

Quick Summary: if you are seeing the red exclamation on your web apps in the old Azure portal (http://manage.windowsazure.com) run the PowerShell Get-AzureWebsite command to see if you have deployment slots that are orphaned when you deleted the parent Web App. Delete the orphans and the red exclamation (and related issues) will be resolved.

Over the last couple of days I had been dealing with a couple of issues with my Azure Web Apps (formerly known as Azure Web Sites). When I would access the old portal, I would not be able to manage the Web Apps and I would see a visual cue:

I also had some strange behavior with a couple of other things that I was doing in the portal. I had created a new App Service Plan and migrated all my sites over to it, but I could not delete the old App Service plan through the new portal and the old portal would not let me access the Web Apps or the App Service plans. When I looked at the App Service Plan that I was trying to delete in the new portal it showed as having 0 sites:

You can see from the screen shot that the name of the App Service Plan was “Prod-Sites”. I thought this might have actually been part of the problem. The new portal was updated to prohibit any special character other than the underscore “_” some time after I had created “Prod-Sites”.

The other odd behavior I saw was the inability to add a custom domain to a deployment slot on one of the websites. I was not able to pin down whether that was due to the underlying issue or was just a problem with the new portal (remember that the old portal was not working at the time). Truth be told the deployment slots was what I really should have been working on, the App Service Plan clean up was just some Yak Shaving along the way.

I spent a couple hours over the course of 3 days trying different things in order to resolve the issue(s). At one point I deleted all of the websites on the account, save one that would have been really hard to reconfigure (the other 3 sites deploy from Visual Studio Online with a couple clicks). I was about to delete the last web site when I remembered something my first mentor told me:

“Never trust a GUI when you have the command line” -CJS

I ran the Get-AzureWebsite command in PowerShell and saw the problem:

There were 2 deployment slots listed that belonged to a Web App that I had deleted about a week ago (before all the Yak Shaving started). If you are not familiar with the slots or how they are shown in PowerShell, they are the ones identified with the (test) and (staging) above. The deployment slots are a “feature” of the Web App and are not normally visible in the old or the new portal, unless you open the Web App or look at the settings. It stands to reason that an “orphaned” deployment slot from a Web App would create some havoc with the GUI.

I used the Remove-AzureWebSite PowerShell command with the -Slot option to delete the two slots and that quickly cleared up all of my problems. I don’t know the root cause of the orphaned deployment slots, but as a precaution I will be deleting the Deployment Slots explicitly before I delete the Web App they are associated with to avoid this problem in the future.

I will be rooting for the Oakland A’s in game 5 of the ALCS on Thursday (October 10th). I posted this photo to show that, but also to practice my Photoshop skills. You can also check out the original photo.

Note: I stitched 2 screen shots together to create the seamless look in the screenshot above. My phone is not this long and skinny. In reality, the screen ends on about 2/3rds of the way down the photos hub and you can’t see the bottom apps without scrolling.

A little drab

One of my co-workers asked me what my color scheme was on my phone and before I could answer they blurted out “dull and boring!” The “steel” accent color on the dark background looks a little drab, and when you combine that with the fact that I am carrying a matte black Nokia Lumia 920, it can come across as the Orwellian. I have always tended towards the gray colors myself and I do try and brighten up the screen with the tulip photos (that is a picture that I took a couple years ago – not a stock one). Being able to pick the color scheme that matches your personality (or even your mood) is something I like about the Windows Phone. In a crazy bright mood? How about Magenta on a light background (I am sure this would look awesome on a Cyan Phone):

Not a lot of apps, eh?

I don’t have a ton of apps on my phone, I can easily list all the applications I have installed: Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Bing Translator and every edition of Angry Birds. Some people might say (in a snarky voice): “That is because Windows Phone does not have any apps!” Windows Phone is missing some notable apps that are on Android and iOS (Instagram, Path, Vine and Flipboard are probably the three most talked about), but there are plenty of good and some great apps that are on Windows Phone for a total of about 160,000+. But I don’t think I would be downloading any more apps than the ones that I have. There are two reasons and one is very notable about Windows Phone:

Many of the things that you would use an app for are built into Windows Phone. It has great integration with my calendar, e-mail, tasks and contact databases. This is true both for Microsoft Services (like Exchange and outlook.com), but is also true for services by Google and Yahoo! as well.

I would rather use the web than an app. Probably the number one thing I do on my phone is e-mail. Tied for second is either listening to podcasts or browsing the web (but a distant second). I would rather look at a website than download an app any day of the week. Nothing upsets me more than a company that wants me to download an app to do something mundane like get a map of their building or a list of their store hours. The mobile (responsive) web continues to get better and better and (I hope) we will soon be in a position that the mobile web will be a first class citizen and we won’t have to use apps except for the few things that require them (like shooting birds at rock and stones structures.

My favorite thing about Windows Phone?

Live Tiles – hands down. It is hard to show in a screen shot, but the Music+Videos app on the lower right of the start screen is animated with Neko Case’s picture and Name because her song was playing when I took the picture. Also the contacts that I have pinned to the start screen (my wife Jodie and my sons) will show their latest status from social media that I have wired up (Twitter and Facebook).

I would be interested to see how other people customize their screen (not just Windows Phone – iOS and Android as well). It really should reflect your personality.

My buddy Michael Steineke @msteineke pinged me yesterday with a problem that he was having doing a clean install of Windows 8 Enterprise on his new ThinkPad Helix. He only got a few seconds into the explanation of the problem he was having when I told him the problem was his USB was not formatted as FAT32 and if he re-formatted the USB it would solve his problem. I know this because I had a similar experience last months when I was doing a clean install on my ThinkPad Carbon Touch. Mike and I both agreed that we should document the problem and solution in case someone else runs into it.

In order to enable secure boot on a Windows 8 Machine, you must have UEFI and Secure Boot enabled when you install and if you use USB Media to install, it must be formatted as FAT32. Many USB drives are formatted as NTFS and many utilities that create bootable media for install will format the drives as NTFS (like the Windows 7 USB Utility). Windows 8 can install from this media (if you disable secure boot), but that is a feature you want. Instructions on how to create a FAT32 bootable drive are included at the bottom of this post.

UEFI Secure Boot is a great thing….

Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is the modern firmware for operating systems to control the underlying hardware. You can think of it as the new version of the BIOS. UEFI is not a Windows-only technology, but a standard that is used by most operating systems. One of the new benefits is the ability to have a digitally signed and verified boot path (or secure boot). This all but eliminates attack vectors that load early in the boot processes (think root kits). With secure boot, you know that the entire code path has been digitally signed and that it has not been changed or tampered with.

A few notes

Even though both Mike and I were running Lenovo Ultrabooks, this is not limited to those devices. This applies equally to all non-legacy devices (Dell, ASUS, ACER, HP, etc.)

If you are loading from a DVD, you should not run into this problem

I have run into one device, the Samsung Build PC, that in addition to needing to be FAT32 the USB needed to be less than 4GB in order to boot

This has been documented elsewhere on the internet (see this the Windows IT Pro Article), but it seems like you can’t find it when you need it 🙂

Create a Fat32 Bootable USB

Be very careful when using the following commands, as selecting the wrong device could lead to data loss or other heart break. When in doubt, ask someone to double check your assumptions.

Launch an elevated command prompt and run the diskpart command:

C:>diskpart

Select your USB device by listing the devices on your computer and then selecting it by number. Make sure that you select the correct device as future commands will wipe the device:

DISKPART>list disk

DISKPART>select disk <disk#>

Remove all current partitions from the device and create a new primary partition. This command will use all available space on the USB drive:

DISKPART>clean

DISKPART>create partition primary

Select the Partition and make it active:

DISKPART>select partition 1

DISKPART>active

Format the partition and assign a drive letter:

DISKPART>format quick fs=fat32

DISKPART>assign

Exit the DISKPART Utility:

DISKPART>exit

Now you can copy the contents of the Windows 8 ISO onto the drive via Explorer, XCOPY or your favorite utility that copies files. Be sure to enable secure boot and boot from the USB drive to install.

I went to the Milwaukee ALT.NET (@AltDotNetMke) group’s Holiday hangout a couple weeks ago. It was a fun night of drinking a couple beers, talking shop and some non-shop items. One of the things that we talked about was something that is very near and dear to my heart: how fast can you get a new member of your team up to speed and productive and what the answer says about how mature your development processes are. I heard a pretty surprising response from a couple of the folks at the Holiday Hang out when I asked the question.

Start timing to see how long it takes for the new developer to be able to get the latest version of your source code and successfully have it running on their machine.

The new developer is allowed to ask follow-up questions (and you should take notes on every question that they ask), but you are not allowed to actually do anything for them. Each time that you have to look at their machine in order to answer a question, you should add an hour to the clock time. Once the developer has the code running, take note of that time. I like to call this the “zero to configured” metric. If you are like most development teams, this number probably makes you want to weep uncontrollably. Most development teams probably think this should take them a “few minutes”, but the actual number is probably located between several hours and never with most answers hovering in the neighborhood of a couple of days. Seriously – try this test and see for yourself.

I wish I had actual data on this metric to share, but I only have anecdotal information. But if you work in software, you probably have a lot of anecdotal stories of your own. Here are a couple tidbits:

The project that could not build or debug unless the files were located in C:projectserin

The search for the .h file that you only have the .obj for

The class library that only worked from C:Program Files (did you know that is not a universal in Windows, it can be installed on other drives and I know that older versions of Italian installed used C:Programi)

The application whose production build only worked on one developer’s laptop (and the 4 hours of terror as chkdsk and several other tools were run trying to get it passed a boot error)

The application that required you to be running as a local administrator (*)

Brining on an extra developer to help finish a release on time only to have him leave 2 weeks later never having written a line of code (a shining example of the Mythical Man Month)

The unit tests that work perfectly until you deployed them on the server and then could only run if you spent an hour in regedit32

I was not personally involved in every one of these and I have tried to keep the details vague to protect the guilty (unless you name is Erin – sorry dude).

Does a high “zero to configured” metric mean you are a bad group of developers? No. It could be that you are a good group of developers and you don’t have a lot of new people on boarding. We tend to work on problems that we encounter more frequently and if you don’t bring on new developer, you probably won’t address it. It does mean that you will probably have a painful time when you get a new machine.

Does a low “zero to configured” metric mean you are an awesome group of developers? No. It could be you have a very simple application or spend too much time worrying about on-boarding new developers. I will say that there is a high correlation between a good development team and a low “zero to configured” metric.

That was why I was so impressed by the answer that one of the guys gave when I asked the question at the alt.Net hangout. He said that he rolled onto a project a few weeks before and was up and running in about 2 hours. The impressive part was that the 2 hours included installing the local version of SQL Server. Kudos to that team!

* Seriously – quit running as an administrator. You will write better code, spend less time debugging issues and be much more secure as a result.